communication

Jul 12 2011

Filtering the world

A sudden thought popped into my head:

In a time where we get a lot of our news online, we also have search giants trying to tailor their results to our liking. Why is this happening? And an even better question, could it actually be bad?

The growth of content

It’s happening as a response to the fantastic growth of online content. With millions of pages appearing every day, it’s impossible to find what we’re looking for. We turn to google and yahoo and bing (who users bing? Seriously?), and they say ok ok, I want you to keep using my services so I’ll help you out. The reason why people started liking google so much was that it worked! It filtered out the crap and gave you what you wanted.

Then they started personalizing searches as well as ads. This was where the internet started to work for us. And against us. It worked for us because now we could get to the content that we WANTED. The content that was relevant to us. All the irrelevant content was being filtered out by google or blocked by our ever-present adblockers. And that in itself is the inherent problem in filtering results. We are removing information that we don’t want.

We are slowly (and successfully) blocking ads, filtering and personalizing search results & blocking friends and twitter feeds that annoy us. What’s worse is we don’t just block out what annoys us, we block out things that we don’t already have an interest in. And our excuse (and it’s a good excuse) is “information overload”. With hundreds of updates on our news feed every day, we don’t bother with them all and block links on topics that we aren’t already obsessed in.

No more discovery?

Yes, we still discover new things online every day, thanks to news sites and blogs and facebook shared links. But it’s limited to the circle of friends we choose (and whether we block their links from showing up on our news feed). We are consciously limiting our own horizons. And ideas don’t come from empty brains. They come from brains exposed to and stimulated by (inspired by?) a multitude of ideas. To create a rich soil from which ideas can grow, we can’t simply limit ourselves to only ideas or blogs or circles of friends that we are comfortable with. How can you think about solutions on “the shortage of clean water” when you don’t even know it’s a fast growing problem that is already affecting the developing world and will affect the developed world soon as well.

A future of 12 year-olds

If the internet starts getting any better in “personalizing the web” or “predicting relevant search results”, our online information exposure will be limited to things that interest you when you first came online. Imagine the kids nowadays who come online at a young age. Imagine a 12-year-old. Now, what if his main source of information isn’t TV or the newspaper, but rather the internet? Not so hard to imagine is it?

That 12-year-old will have an internet that only ever feeds him what he is interested in. If that happens for a year, at 13 he will still only know about the topics that interested him at 12. If it happens for another 3 years, at 15 he will still only know those topics. He won’t get exposure to politics, or extreme ironing, or coding. Fast forward 20 years, you’ll have a person whose age is 35 but has not much more world exposure than that 12-year-old. Simple because the internet was waayyyy too good in “personalizing search results”.

Real Life

That was obviously an extreme example. But that’s where the internet collective is headed unless we introduce a way to get new (and possibly disruptive) ideas to come into our line of sight. Currently, that purpose is served by “real life”. By having friends and family, we are often forced to expose ourselves to their ideas and viewpoints as well and this can serve as a trigger for us to learn about a new topic.

But the internet has given us access to millions like us. In our own geographical area, we might find 1 or 2 people who think the same. You make friends with them and make a clique. On the internet, there are millions like us. There is no end to people who have the same viewpoint. Under those conditions, why would you hang out with someone who is completely different from you? We already pick our friends in real life. This is easily magnified in our virtual lives.

So what should we do about this? Is it even a real problem in the first place?

By Lutfi Torla • Reflections • 0 • Tags: , , , ,

Jun 5 2011

Fancy language (A short rant)

Ok. So I surf the net and come across this comment on a post about “Assertiveness vs Aggressiveness in the workplace“. Take a moment and try to read it.

The current work-places and office layouts are laid out to facilitate progressive accomplishment of perceived behavior of employees at various management rungs. The mode of communication-interface is becoming non-verbal among the employees. The assumed and tacit differences are mental battle-fields in the mist. The reactive mentality which is often the bellwether of aggression is overt in the day –to-day business transactions. Despite knowing that such attitude is transitional in tasking; the resulting emotion may cause short-term disgruntlement of all involved. Such situations often challenge assertive attitude because of the merging differences with statements of aggression.

What on EARTH is it saying?!!!!

I’m sorry but I have no idea myself. It took me 10 minutes to read it and I had to read it back 7 times over to make some sense out of it. This is what happens when you try to use heavy jargon, convoluted words, and fancy language to try to impress people. You might impress people with how many words you know, but you destroy the message you want to send across.

Let’s fix it up?

Let’s try to fix it up:

Modern offices are designed to allow employees to communicate face-to-face easily. However this means that body language is becoming much more important in that communication. Differences in aggressiveness and assertiveness can sometimes just be in the mind. Therefore, some people may react badly when they believe that their colleague is being aggressive when he actually isn’t, and this bad reaction will cause further discord inside the workplace. These situations make things worse because they narrow down the difference between assertive and aggressive behaviour for future interaction.

There, isn’t that much more readable? Even then I’m not sure if I’m writing it correctly coz I didn’t fully understand what the original comment meant.

Moral of the story

Please save technical jargon for journal papers. Use proper simple English when you write. The world thanks you.

By Lutfi Torla • Communicating • 0 • Tags: , , , ,

Jun 14 2010

What I learned from debate

Debate is something that took over my life. I obsessed over it. I threw away weekends for it. When people invited me out, I’d say, “I can’t. I’ve got debate.” I even joined a facebook group of the same name (as the quote).

But it’s something I have surprisingly few regrets about. It’s such an enriching experience to learn, not just how to stand up and speak, but to do it in a focused and structured way.

1. It taught me where Iraq was.

I confess. I was horrible at geography and history before this. I could tell you that I had heard of North Korea but I wouldn’t have been able to accurately point it out on a map.

Because of debating, I can safely say that I can at least point out a few countries.

2. It taught me to never stray from your objective.

You should never ever explain more than important. Because they’ll stop listening to you anyway after they hear what they want. And all you’ll end up doing is wasting everyone’s time including your own.

And the importance of having a clear objective becomes that much clearer. Now, I utterly hate people who do things or say things that don’t help them achieve their objective. Ok well, maybe I don’t hate them. But it’s so frustrating to hear them blabber on and on about irrelevant things, or to see them do so many things that are pointless.

Of course, to only do things relevant to your objective, you have to have an objective in the first place. Over 4 years, debate drummed it into me that you must always have an objective.

3. It honed my skills in explaining complex ideas in an economy of words.

You only have 7 minutes to explain how you want to save the world before bedtime.

Let’s say it takes 5 seconds to say a sentence. That’s only 84 sentences you can say to describe the political situation in some country on the other side of the world and explain why aid is the worst thing you can do to the farmers in the area as well as put forward your own solution for the problem at hand and of course defend it from the arguments of your opponent.

Did I mention you have to find the flaws in what your opponent says and attack those too? 7 minutes is waaaayyyyy too short.

4. It made me meet so many kinds of people.

There are a number of awesome people in this world. It seems that a huge proportion of them are in debate. Not only that, you get to meet so many varieties. I don’t just mean in terms of race or culture. I also mean in terms of people who are just different. Their styles, their personalities, their very outlook on life.

And where else could you find such a diverse group who would be more than willing to talk and talk and talk and…

5. It allowed me to get away from the calculator.

I’m in engineering. The hard sciences don’t give much room to discuss world issues in class. In law or economics or sociology, you discuss world issues all the time. So I stepped out of my classroom and tried to be a little more well-rounded. I didn’t want to just be a guy who knew how numbers worked. I wanted to know what those numbers meant.

Engineering is supposed to use science to solve real world problems. How do I do that unless I know what those “real world problems” are?

So…

If you’ve got the time, join debate. It’s so worth it.

If you haven’t got it, make time.

By Lutfi Torla • Communicating, Reflections • 2 • Tags: , , , , , , ,

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